The Universality and Cultural Specificity of Emotions through a Comparative Semantic Analysis of Emotion Terms in English and MA

The aim of this paper is to explore the semantic field of emotions in Moroccan Arabic (MA), a variety of Standard Arabic (SA) that is hardly researched as far as this area of research (emotions and language) is concerned. The paper categorises and identifies the terms of these emotions and their semantic organisation in this variety. It further discusses the universality and cultural specificity of emotions through a comparative semantic analysis of emotion terms in English and MA.

The findings of the study will add to the relatively limited literature on emotions in MA and also serve as a basis for further research into other areas including the language of emotions, and emotions and culture. It is also hoped that the findings of this study will add to the literature on universality/cultural specificity of emotions.

Beyond the introduction, the paper is organized into four sections. The second section discusses the Johnson-Laird & Oately’s theory of emotions and its application to English language. It further discusses the status of MA. The third section explains the methodology followed in this study through explaining the participants’ background, data collection procedure, and data analysis procedure. The results of the findings are presented in the fourth section. The last section discusses and recapitulates the findings of the study.

Johnson-Laird & Oatley (1989)’s semantic analysis of English emotion terms distinguishes seven main types of emotion words which denote: generic emotions, basic emotions, emotional relations, caused emotions, causatives, emotional goals, and complex emotions. The analysis of these emotion words reveals that there are 109 emotion terms that can be used to denote basic emotions; but only five modes—happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust—can refer to them in their unmodified forms. The remaining emotion words denote mild, ordinary, and intense emotions. For example, to be joyful is to feel considerable happiness, whereas to be ecstatic is to feel intense happiness.

According to Johnson-Laird & Oatley (1989), besides these basic emotions, humans can experience emotions that have an object, a cause, or a goal, and other complex emotions. Emotions that can have an object are typically about someone or something (love, miss, fear, angry with, etc. e.g., James fears John). Caused emotions includes words that describe feelings with known causes (e.g., glad, sorrow, panic, furious, disgust). Causative emotions (e.g., excite, provoke, stir, overwhelm), on the other hand, express the relation between the cause of an emotion and the person who experiences it. The next category displays emotions that often function as motives that lead to characteristic behaviours designed to achieve goals. For example, the achievement of a goal produces happiness, which can be denoted by words such as inclination, desire, need, etc. Unfulfilled goals may lead to sadness or to anger, and these states can be denoted by words such as discontent, disappointment, frustration, etc. The final category encompasses complex emotion (regret, embarrassment, shame, etc.). Thus the remaining 481 emotion terms refer to these categories of emotion, but all of them depend on the five basic modes.

It seems then that the lexicon of emotions in English is organized in a semantic field that is based on five emotional modes-happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. This set of basic emotions is very similar to other recent proposals and comprises all the basic emotions assembled. In particular, these basic modes of emotions are similar to Ekman et al. (1969)’s list of emotions (except surprise which Johnson-Laird and Oatley did not consider to be an emotion) that they consider to be basic as they have distinct nonverbal displays and thus exist in all humans across different societies and cultures, including literate and preliterate cultures (Ekman & Friesen 1971).

Unlike other theorists who identify meticulous differences between emotions and other phenomena, namely moods, sentiments, feelings, and personality traits (Wierzbicka 1999, Ben-Ze’ev 2000, Pavlenko 2005, Yasunari 2018), for Johnson-Laird and Oatley, basic emotions comprise all these phenomena. For example, an individual can be described as irritable if he or she is currently angry, or in an angry mood, or has a general disposition to be angry. They explain that basic emotion terms can be used to refer to moods or to emotional types of personality because “moods and personality types do not have a discernible cognitive cause. Both depend on emotion modes, and it follows that the vocabulary of basic emotions should provide descriptions of moods and personalities.” (Johnson-Laird & Oatley 1989: 98).

MA refers to the variety spoken by the majority of Moroccans except the 10% who are monolingual Berbers (Youssi 1983). As the name indicates, MA is historically related to Classical Arabic (CA). Hence, like CA, MA belongs to the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (Ennaji et al. 2004, Feras 2015, Mahmoud 2016, Nasser 2017, Mahmoud 2018, Boubekri 2019). Although it shares many properties with classical Arabic, especially at the lexical level, MA is distinct from Classical Arabic as well as from the varieties of the Middle East (Ennaji et al. 1994). This deviation of MA from CA is due to its direct contact with Berber which has influenced its sound pattern; morphology and lexicon (Ech-charfi 2018).

MA stands in a diglossic relationship with Classical Arabic (Ferguson 1959). Classical Arabic enjoys a higher and prestigious status in Morocco because it is the language of basic education; And it is the language used in formal occasions, administration, and writing purposes. By contrast, MA is used in informal settings for daily conversations and transactions. Hence, the linguistic continuum in Morocco is implicitly interpreted as divided into two levels: a lower level referred to as ‘Darija’ or colloquial Arabic, and a higher level representing classical or standard Arabic. This view has been criticized by several scholars, especially foreign ones (for an overview see Ech-charfi 2017). According to these scholars, the linguistic situation related to the Arabic language cannot be studied by assuming only two levels of Arabic because the discourses produced by Arabic speakers, either written or oral, colloquial or standard, are often a mix of different features, some of which belong to Classical Arabic, and some belong to a lower spoken variety, but it is difficult to classify the text as belonging to the former or the latter. Hence, scholars have identified different levels of Arabic, but they do not agree on the number of these levels.

To start with, Youssi (1992), who studies the Arabic variety spoken in Morocco, concludes that there are three varieties of Arabic in Morocco: the colloquial variety for daily communication, a standard variety for reading and writing and specialized communication, and a middle variety for communication between educated people. Although this middle variety is generally characterised by borrowing vocabulary from Classical Arabic, it is influenced by the colloquial sound system and grammatical structure. Hence, each Arab country has its own middle variety. On the other hand, Badawi (1973, as cited in Ech-charfi 2017) distinguished five linguistic levels in modern Arabic that reflect a number of social factors. These levels are as follows: (i) Arabic of the heritage, (ii) modern Arabic, (iii) Colloquial of the educated, (iv) Colloquial of the enlightened and (v) Colloquial Arabic of illiterates. Features of Classical Arabic are prevalent at the first level and then begin in deflation until they are almost non-existent at the last level.

Regardless of these suggested linguistic levels, the variety adopted in this study is the one termed by Youssi (1992) as the ‘middle variety’. Hence, when the reader comes across standard Arabic emotion words like ‘xaybat Ɂamal’ or ‘Ɂiħbaṭ’, it should be understood that such standard terms are often used in the speech of educated Moroccan people. Therefore, since the current study targets intermediate and advanced Moroccan learners of English, who have studied Standard Arabic at least for twelve years, it entails that these learners are not unfamiliar with this ‘middle variety’, which will be referred to as ‘Moroccan Arabic’ throughout this dissertation.

Data were drawn from 29 native speakers of MA, including 25 students studying a master program at the faculty of Education, and four professors as consultants aged between 35 and 50 years. The data were collected in October, 2019.

Listing emotion terms in MA was a challenging task. For there are no studies conducted on the language of emotions in this variety. Hence, all mental states that are supposed to denote emotions in Moroccan Arabic were listed. This took two steps: In the first phase, a preliminary list of emotion words, based on a bilingual dictionary of MA and English (Harrel 2007), was examined. In the second phase, other emotion terms from SA (based on Al-Baalabaki (2007)’s English-Arabic dictionary), which are used by educated MA speakers, were added to the list.

The decision about the emotionness of these terms is based on Oatley et al. (2006: 96) definition of emotion, which can be summarized as follows: (i) It is caused by the conscious or unconscious evaluation of an event as relevant to a concern or goal; It is felt as positive when a goal is advanced and as negative when a goal is impeded; (ii) It consists of action readiness and the prompting of plans, gives priority and a sense of urgency to one or a few kinds of action, and thus interrupts or competes with other mental processes and actions; (iii) It is usually experienced as a distinctive type of mental state, sometimes accompanied or followed by bodily changes, expressions, and actions.

Hence, all the emotion terms that satisfy these criteria were listed. The number of the emotion terms obtained from the two dictionaries is 131 terms which were then reviewed and checked by four highly educated native speakers of MA. These emotion terms are listed in Appendix 2. The terms that have near equivalents in English are translated, and those that have partial equivalents or no equivalents in English are paraphrased.

In order to explore the distribution of the given emotion terms across morphosyntactic categories, the participants were given the list of emotion terms in Appendix 2 and were asked to write sentences using these terms. Thus, obtaining examples of emotions through this corpus based data would allow the researchers to study structural and lexical choices in context.

The descriptive approach was used for the analysis of data. The emotion terms were categorised according to their appearance in the examples provided by the participants, who were asked to use the given emotion in all the probable structures in which these emotion terms can be found. That is, either as adjectives, nouns, complex nouns, adverbs, or verbs (whether they can be used to describe one’s emotional states, or ones’ emotional state as related to others, or whether they can be causative or caused emotions).